Authors: Ross Gilfillan
C
HAPTER
18
Love Hurts
Roger is sitting on the compactor in his red Speedos, telling me how he met Poon Tang at the airport. He’s completely given up on trying to pronounce her real name now and Pao-Pei will, in Laurel Gardens at least, forever be Poon Tang. He is as happy as Larry, probably much happier; I doubt if this Larry ever went about with such a goofy grin spread across his chops. By the side of Roger, said Larry would be a miserable character, incapable of raising a smile or enjoying a chuckle. Roger Dyson is where happiness is at, right now.
He looks like he hasn’t got a care in the world and any menace I might have imagined about him has vanished completely. He doesn’t give a monkey’s about Clive’s failure to score at Whitby, despite his footing of most of the bill for our trip. ‘Clive will sort himself out when he’s good and ready,’ Roger says.
‘You can lead a horse to water,’ I say, unwisely.
‘Like I said before,’ Roger says quickly. ‘No whores.’
I have never seen him like this, grinning away as he sits in the sun, one hand down his Speedos, scratching his balls. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quite this happy. It’s unnatural. And all because of the delightful young lady in a blue and pink sarong who has just now served us with long glasses of ice cold beer. She is as striking as her photographs. Tall, lean and angular, not much of a top deck, I notice, but that doesn’t worry Roger, who professes to be a leg man anyway. And Poon Tang has legs, he says, which reach all the way to the ground. He watches her bottom jiggle under the silk as she sashays back to the house, casting a last quick smile over her shapely shoulder.
‘I can’t tell you how that woman has changed my life,’ Roger says. ‘Life without her was meaningless, empty. But now, it’s as if
the sun has come out and chased every grey cloud from the sky.’
Ee-yuk, I’m thinking, this man is in love.
He tells me how Poon Tang has taken over the house, deep cleaning the kitchen and sorting all the other forgotten places too and how her cooking is ‘just out of this world’. He tells me that it’s an added bonus that Clive and Poon Tang get on like a house on fire. But I’ve seen that already, when they got off the bus outside the bungalow earlier on, giggling like a pair of schoolgirls. Clive has talked of no one else since Roger drove down to Heathrow and picked her up, last week.
Poon Tang has taken over Clive’s room for the time being; Clive sleeps on the sofa in the living room. This is in accordance with a custom which Poon Tang insists on maintaining, which is that a betrothed couple mustn’t share a bed until a month before the wedding. After initial resistance, Roger has gone along with his beloved’s wishes and is only glad that he doesn’t have to wait until after the wedding itself.
‘She is a paragon of womankind,’ Roger says. ‘She is more beautiful, much sexier and far superior in every respect to any other woman on God’s earth. She is, you know. And she’s mine, Brian, all mine. Can you believe that?’
I’ve become a little bored with loved-up Roger and my mind has drifted somewhere else. I might just be thinking of someone who outdoes Roger’s Poon Tang on all these counts and several more. But Roger interprets my distraction in his own way and says, ‘But don’t get me wrong, son. Your mother is a lovely lady too and your father is very lucky indeed to have her. The gorgeous Violet is a wonderful woman. It’s just that she hasn’t got that little extra something which I think my Poon Tang’s got. You know what I mean?’
I don’t, not just then, anyway.
Clive and Poon Tang come out of the house bearing trays of snacks and more drinks. Clive and Poon Tang sit on a seat together. It’s only a rough plank on two piles of bricks but neither
seem to mind that at all. Roger beams at Poon Tang, then at Clive and then me. Then once again, he slips his hand under the elastic of his trunks and sighs deeply and contentedly as he adjusts the lie of his tackle.
Before Chris Evans took over Radio 2’s breakfast slot, Mum would listen to Terry Wogan. She listened religiously, from the until 9.30, when the show ended. She would have ‘listened in’ from 7.00, but there was Dad’s breakfast to make and his shirt to iron and a list of complaints, usually about Roger, to pretend to listen to. She had a signed photograph of Terry himself in a drawer in her sewing room and unbeknownst to Dad, sometimes wore her TOGS sweatshirt around the house when he wasn’t there. Under the pseudonym of Crazy Daisy, I’m amazed to learn, Mum’s made regular contributions to the show. And she knows all Terry’s catchphrases, often retiring to bed muttering something about being banjaxed. The one I’ve heard her most use has been, Is it me? For years I thought this was a very silly and meaningless expression. It says you’re realising that though the world mightn’t be crazy after all, you are. And now I’ve been using it myself.
Is it me?
I’m thinking as I see Dad going off late to work with his face unshaven and his tie left on the breakfast table. He’s late because instead of the bowl of All-Bran he’s had every breakfast of his life as far as I know, Dad’s had a big fry up, which he cooked himself and shared with Mum. It’s the culmination of a week in which everything he’s done could be termed out of character. Yesterday, Sunday, he was out in the garden wearing baggy trousers and a smiley tee shirt, both of which items must date from about 1989 and look like he wore them once and put them away forever. And he wasn’t gardening, either, but rolling out the lines for a badminton court. The net was up by mid-afternoon and he and Mum and Roger and Poon Tang were enjoying a noisy knockabout shortly afterwards. It’s unsettling.
Mum, I should say in the interests of fairness, has also been acting oddly, which of course, brings me back to the,
Is it me?
thing. But she really has been a different person these past few days. For instance, I’ve never heard Mum make a disparaging remark about anyone, not even about Mrs Shaw across the road, who’s rumoured to supplement her housekeeping with ‘personal services’, but Mum’s been surprisingly sharp-tongued about Roger’s intended. According to Mum, Poon Tang is ‘no better than she should be’ and while I don’t know exactly what that means, I don’t think it’s a compliment. And she, Mum, has been wearing brighter clothes, might even have bought some new ones and I think she’s been using a little makeup, too.
I’m wondering if this has anything to do with Dad passing on what I’d told him. He did it out in his greenhouse, where she’d brought him a cup of tea. I could see them both from the house, Dad’s hands describing his surprise and relief at discovering the missing piece of his life’s jigsaw. And I saw Mum take it all in and then turn her gaze towards the house. They were there for ages and must have talked about more than Dad’s adoption and it’s my guess that he told her something of his future plans. That might explain the strange, faraway smile that crosses Mum’s face these days, when she thinks no one’s looking. To me, it’s the smile of someone realising that life isn’t set in stone after all and that other possibilities might still be open.
Today the changes in the Johnson household moved up a gear and they began with my unshaven Dad driving off to work thirty-one minutes late. He didn’t appear to care, either. And then, as he passed the breakfast table, I had the bizarre idea that he was humming something by The Smiths. I looked at Mum for reassurance but she only shrugged and stirred something in a pan, saying she was going to take something hot round for Roger – goodness knew what that new girl was giving him. I was still pondering all this, trying to identify the song Dad was singing and even considering the possibility that I’d been overdoing
things recently – maybe if I had a nice long sleep, everything would seem more normal when I woke up. But then, just before lunch, Dad’s car swings back into the driveway and my world does a backflip.
That’s what I’m thinking as I stand in the kitchen with Mum, listening to Dad – my dad, the wage slave and probable company “yes” man – describing in excited tones how he’s told the manager of his department store to do one. I’m gobsmacked. My dad’s actually told the Victoria where they can stick their crappy job. He’s finally stood up to the machine which has been grinding him down, year after year. Go, Dad! I stand in the kitchen looking at him in a whole new light, the shockwaves still bouncing about the room: I don’t think Mum or I think for one minute about what we’d all do about the salary he’d just lost.
No one says ‘language, Brian!’ as I sit down at the kitchen table, muttering fuck me, over and over again. Mum doesn’t say anything, not just then. She smiles at Dad and at me too, like she knows that somehow, everything’s going to be fine, that Dad chucking his job is the best thing that could have happened. Dad must have stopped off somewhere to buy pastries and popping these on a plate, he makes a pot of coffee. Sitting across the table from Mum, he tells us that this is indeed all for the best. Now, he says, is the time for us all to take stock. Then he gets all philosophical.
‘The way we’ve been living has been safe and secure,’ he says. ‘But it’s also been dull and, um, perhaps devoid of the brilliant bursts of happiness which should punctuate a well-rounded existence.’ Wow. Where did that come from? Has Dad been at his Readers’ Digests again? And there’s more. ‘I’ve only lately realised,’ he says, ‘that the pursuit of happiness itself is not a selfish idea and that if we are all to find our own, then now is the time to start looking.’ While Mum and I are digesting this, he says he knows what he himself needs to do to find happiness and he’d like to talk to Violet about it later. He thinks she’ll see that his
way will be best for all of us. And while he makes his plans, he’s going to cash in the lump sum of his pension, which will give us more than we need for our present difficulties. Mum and I sit there, stunned, frozen, flakes from the pastries left unbrushed from our lips.
Mum recovers first and a very neat recovery it is too, mentioning that the corner shop down by the Co-op is empty now, the one that had been a tobacconist’s, and saying what a nice florist’s it would make. Dad swallows too much of his Danish and tries not to splutter. Then he thinks for a moment, comes quickly to a decision and says he’ll see how much is in his pension fund, but that Mum should start costing it out now. Dad says he won’t need much to live on, not for the life he’s got planned. It sounds to me like Mum and himself might go their separate ways and I want to ask what’s going on? And what about me? But Mum’s already talking about wholesale flower dealers
I’m wondering if she knew this was coming.
And I’m just sitting there thinking,
Is it me?
Mum may be fine with all this. I’m sure she has enough reason to be, but I’m a little shaken, to tell the truth. To restore just a little order in the only way I know how, I spend the whole of the afternoon not just tidying, but actually cleaning my room. You heard right, bubba. And this gives me plenty of time to think. As I carefully extract about a hundred used tissues from behind the headboard and tear off a second bin liner for crushed Diet Coke tins, empty bottles of Smirnoff Ice, half-finished bottles of cobalt-coloured WKD and some hard, green and long-forgotten slices of pizza, I come around to thinking that okay, these changes have had their positive sides, too. They may all be positive – I won’t know until I’ve seen where they’re taking us. But definitely on the plus side has been Dad’s much-improved attitude towards GD and Nana. Now that he knows for certain that he isn’t their natural son and understands how he was
rescued from an orphanage by their kindness, it seems he can’t do enough to make up for what he considers to be his own inattentiveness. And Mum’s clearly much happier, even excited about the future. So I’m thinking something new: if my parents actually split, would that have to be a bad thing?
Dad has driven me over to see GD, who has been as much surprised in the transformations in Charlie as I’ve been. But GD has had no reservations about this, he’s been delighted and might have leapt off his chair to hug his adopted son, had his lower leg not been encased in a pottery cast which has already been autographed by about a hundred friends.
This afternoon, we are having a heart to heart, at Narnia, GD, Charlie and me. (Dad actually prefers to be called Charlie now, even by me – how weird is that?) GD is telling us how he comes to be chair-bound, when he should be at Nana’s side. He’s saying that when Nana suddenly got worse and she had to go into hospital, not being able to be with her was almost more than he could bear. He talked to the doctors and while they tried to say the right things, it was clear enough to him that they weren’t holding out a lot of hope. GD visited her twice daily but coming home from one of these visits, he had been close to despair.
‘If I couldn’t be with Ruth, then there was only one place I wanted to be,’ he tells us.
‘Nana’s Rock,’ I say.
‘That’s the big granite overhang on the tops,’ Dad says.
‘So you do know, Charlie,’ G
D
says, evidently pleased.
‘Where you proposed to Ruth. To Mum, I mean.’
‘Right again. So there I was, sitting on what BJ here calls Nana’s Rock, plumbing the depths of despair. I didn’t know what I could do for the best. I saw that all the plans we had made to give her a good death were really only to distract and comfort me. I’m not one to feel sorry for myself, you both know that. I’d sooner take my disappointments and frustrations out on a piece
of wood in my workshop. But right then, I have to say, I saw no future. Not a glimmer of hope, nothing. All I wanted, was to be with Ruth.’
I am choked up and I can see that Dad’s upset too. Dad says, ‘So you jumped, then. You jumped from the rock. You tried to end it all. Well, under these circumstances, it’s hard to blame you. Even if you would have left Mum on her own for who knows how many more days or weeks. I can’t say I approve of what you tried to do. But I want you to know that I understand.’
Dad pats the pot on GD’s leg: it’s going to take them a while to get touchy-feely. But I’m with Dad on this. What GD attempted is a terrible thing, but I can almost understand what’s driven him to it.